Daniel Harding

Programme
Performers
Information about the programme
Daniel Harding is a welcome guest at the helm of the BRSO. This time he will conduct a programme fully deserving of the title “from adversity to the stars”. Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel Symphony of 2020 was commissioned by several orchestras, including the BRSO. Here he takes up important passages from his like-named opera, premièred at the Salzburg Festival in 2016, and combines them into a four-movement symphony. The starting point was a surrealist film by Luis Buñuel, in which a group of high-bred socialites gather together for a party and are condemned to a nightmarish journey. Adès has supplied music at once exciting and weirdly grotesque. Following this surrealistic vision of Hell there begins a very real heaven-assailing ascent to the heights with Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony.